Twitter Starts To Take The Battle Against Online Abuse Seriously With New 'Quality Filter'

If you've spent much time on Twitter of late you'll have noticed it isn't always the nicest place to hang out, with levels of abuse and trolling worse than ever.

In an effort to address the problem, the site is introducing a 'quality filter' that will be accessible to all users in the next few days.

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The changes mean two things: first, notifications like RTs and @ mentions can be limited to just the people you follow.

Second, you can add a filter that when turned on "improves the quality of Tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account origin and behaviour," Twitter product manager Emil Leong said in a blog post.

In addition to weeding out messages that incite hatred, turning the filter on will remove other "low-quality content" like duplicated spam messages.

The change follows repeated criticisms that Twitter has not done enough to tackle trolling. A recent analysis of sent tweets by Centre for the Analysis of Social Media found that 289 Islamophobic tweets were sent every hour in July - possibly linked to the result of the EU referendum. The findings caused Twitter to change it's policy to include a blanket ban on "hateful conduct." Let's hope the new changes help.